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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   23188 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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So as one of the resident Taiwan pessimists, I have surprising news. Contrary to all my expectations, Trump might have actually pushed back a Taiwan invasion. I'm always a little suspicious of the variable quality of Time magazine stories, but this laid out a pretty cogent case. First, my prior base case:

With the U.S. military depleted and distracted by a conflict on the other side of the globe, observers worried that Chinese strongman Xi Jinping may never have a better opportunity to move on the democratic island of 23 million, whose “reunification” he has called “the great trend of history.” The fear is that Trump’s transactional bearing and embrace of a “might is right” doctrine—both in his own actions and his ambivalence regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—could be interpreted as a green light by Xi.

“Will Xi be tempted to take advantage of U.S. potentially exhausting smart munitions and attack Taiwan even if the PLA is not fully ready?” asks Prof. Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. “Possible.”

You can definitely still make this case. I'm almost tempted to. On a very substantial fact-based level, the US in the next 1-2 years especially will be possibly at the lowest level or readiness in a great while: large portions of the fleet will need refits, interceptor stocks will take years to recover even under optimistic scenarios, other precision munitions are also low, every conflict lowers US domestic appetite for more, and contrarily war would improve domestic approval within China that's otherwise a little grumpy with recent so-so growth. Additionally, there's some mild but decent evidence that US defenses are indeed still vulnerable to the new classes of hypersonic missiles. US capacity and abilities are sure to spike again in the 3-5 year time frame as the US not only implements highly relevant fixes to problems that have been exposed recently, but also continues to re-orient its efforts to prioritize things that threaten China more both directly and indirectly, so the window is real but closing.

However, on a more how-the-real-world-works level, war is less likely. Trump demonstrated quite clearly that the US military is far more capable and combat-ready than observers had assumed. It has the capacity to plan carefully thousands of targets, kidnap or assassinate world leaders (though with nuclear-armed China I disagree that this is very relevant), completely overwhelm air defenses without losses (including at least some amount of Chinese-made equipment in both Venezuela and Iran), sustain and project power across the globe, process an enormous amount of intelligence and surveillance with decent accuracy, and more. And clearly the President can unilaterally do whatever they want, with Trump in particular shedding a previous (avowed) aversion to conflict. DPP is not weak exactly, but definitely having some down moments compared to the more pro-China KMT within Taiwan, mildly raising hopes of a political reunification. And Taiwanese self-defense efforts as far as I can tell remain pretty lackluster despite continuing to shell out for some high end systems. Furthermore this is a tiny little dry run of how badly the global oil supply can get screwed with even a regional war, doubtless actual action would be worse, and I'm guessing China feels a bit of that pain.

And sure enough this seems to be the initial reaction. Here for example, we have a typical bellwether academic at a flagship university saying stuff like this:

Li Yihu, dean of the Taiwan Research Institute at Peking University, said the reunification process would enter an “accelerated phase” in the next five years and the mainland needed to do more to communicate an understanding of what he said was the inevitability of the process.

“Currently, we are doing very well in terms of building the capacity and the resolve to use [military deterrence], but we still need to work on ensuring that … both overt and potential adversaries fully understand the consequences of deterrence and the gains and losses,” he said.

He was referencing the deterrence theory of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who argued that deterrence was a product of the physical military capacity to inflict damage, the resolve and willingness of leadership to act and the potential rivals’ perception and understanding of the deterrer’s power and resolve.

Reading between the lines, the obvious message is: wow, actually, the US is doing really well at deterrence recently in all of these three areas, especially demonstrated capacity and resolve, and China has, well, very little to show for its own efforts. No big operations besides military exercises. No real allies willing to pitch in. Unclear transmission of internal resolve to America, too. So in our how-the-world-actually-works framework, China is missing the essential psychological ingredients to actually pull off deterrence even if I still believe that in terms of the nuts and bolts, China could win pretty handily even if the US intervenes (in terms of a conflict itself) and has more cards to play in terms of the "how". They know it, too, but that's likely not going to be enough.

As such I'll take a predictive L in advance. My predictions about 4-5 years ago that a Taiwanese invasion would happen in approximately this timeframe was wrong. Difficult to foresee political factors significantly distorted the general strategic picture, which I assert remains accurate. My primary failing was underweighting the political side of things and the significant variance there, along with its impact on the strategic calculations necessary to pull the trigger on a big move.

I'd say that the Trump admin's actions in the middle east (the little kids on the playground) are way less indicative of what the US would do with China (the big kid) than the admin's actions with Russia, who is the medium sized kid.

And what we have with Russia is a lot of appeasement and cowardice. Instead of just going in and bombing them, the Trump admin has consistently tried to coax Ukraine into abandoning territory they control in pursuit of a "deal". And when Putin continues to refuse and keeps trying with his invasion, Trump does ... basically nothing.

If it's not morals, and it's not rules of engagement and it's not international law or polling or anything else that holds the admin back from using power and force whenever they want wherever they want them it suggests one of two things when they don't take action 1. They actually support Russia somewhat or 2. They're too scared and don't think they have the power and force to meaningfully win. What else is there?

If this is how we treat the medium kid, with shaky fear and inaction then what will happen when the big kid comes in to bully? If Trump and Hegseth wanted to show actual power and courage against meaningful threats, they'd metaphorically punch Putin in the face and take it to Russia instead of acting like wimps who only take on the preschool next door, and a lot of that seems to only be with our emotional support Israel to comfort and guide us through the scary times.

And what we have with Russia is a lot of appeasement and cowardice. Instead of just going in and bombing them, [...]

Trump is not the only one who has refrained from bombing Russia. The Biden administration did not try either, nor did any European country.

Russia inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal, which happens to be the largest in the world. I am sure that their nukes are not in the best shape, but even if only a quarter of their ICBMs work, a nuclear war would easily dwarf the substantial meat grinder which has been Ukraine.

There is a certain etiquette about avoiding a shooting war between nuclear powers which has seen us through the Cold War. The understanding is that any direct military confrontation carries a risk of escalating (as conflicts often do). Getting through the CW without it escalating was tight as things were. I do not think it would have worked if NATO and USSR had fought conventional skirmishes, where any hit of a radar system might be in preparation of a first strike and any plane approaching an ICBM silo might aim to reduce your retaliatory capacity.

So if the US lands forces in South Vietnam, the USSR will not deploy to North Vietnam, but rather give them military aid. Likewise, if the USSR is fighting the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan, the US will not send in the marines to bolster their ranks.

"Just going in and bombing them" would dispense with that. If you start bombers against Russia from NATO airbases, these NATO airbases will become legitimate targets. Likewise, it seems unlikely that you would achieve air superiority without destroying AA sites within Russia. Or you might directly give Putin the Ayatollah treatment and bomb the Kremlin. At least we would learn something about the effectiveness of US efforts to intercept long range missiles.

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